Canvas API - need to get Student count in a Course without traversing all users

[tom12]

using the Canvas APi - i need a Student Count in a Course. I dont want to traverse or get users back during this by making multiple page calls.

[Chris_Hofer]

Good evening, @tom12 ...

I hardly know anything about API, so I'm sure there are reasons that I'm not aware of that you want to get a student count via that method for a course.

If you are only wanting a student count for one course, you could easily look at that via the screens depicted in this Guide: How do I use the Courses page in an account? - Canvas Community.  Or, you could also go into the actual course "Settings" page, and that student count is also displayed on the right side of the screen under the heading "Current Users".

Again, my solutions are pretty simplistic, and you may have other goals for using API, so I apologize if this isn't really what you're looking for...but I thought I'd offer up these suggestions just in case.  Hope this will be of some help.  Take care...

[BrianLester]

I don't believe any API call will directly return the number of students in a course. This python script, which uses the requests module may accomplish what you need, but not in the way that you want. You'll need to add a bearer token and cookie and use your institution's url and the relevant course code...

You can run the request in Postman and generate code in a variety of languages from there.

You may need to change the per_page setting depending on the size of the class...

import requests

url = "https://yourschool.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/1234/enrollments?type[]=StudentEnrollment&per_page..."

payload={}
headers = {
'Authorization': 'Your bearer token',
'Cookie': 'Your cookie'

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

#print(response.text)

Enrollments=response.json()

k=len(Enrollments)

print(k)

[James]

Most of the time, Canvas doesn't return the number of students, but just counts the entries as @BrianLester suggests to obtain that (if needed).

One thing to watch out for there is pagination. By default, you only get 10 entries returned. You can add per_page=100 as a query parameter, but you will still run into pagination issues if there are more than 100 students. You're also going to end up returning a lot more information than you actually need.

You could use the GraphQL interface, which allows you to pick what information to send, so it is typically faster and it doesn't restrict you to 100 items. The problem is that Canvas hasn't implemented filters on most things, so you cannot filter by the enrollmentType like you can with the REST API.